Who’s doing it right? Featured Facebook Campaigns: Street King and Grey Line

Charity and contests characterized most of the campaigns on our list this week. An interesting combination of celebrity and charity pushed Street King’s growth this week, then realtors in California are trying to promote the importance of their services in that depressed real estate market. A New York tourism company took advantage of Halloween to promote its tour services, MassMutual promotes life insurance with a video campaign and Farmers Insurance enters into its fourth partnership with Zynga.

Below is an excerpt of this week’s full Featured Facebook Campaigns entry in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Street King’s Viral Charity Campaign

Method: Street King is an energy drink from rapper 50 Cent that is also involved in a campaign for the United Nations World Food Programme to provide meals to hungry children. With the purchase of every drink, the company donates a meal.

Core Mechanic: The campaign tightly integrates a celebrity, product, and charity. Engagement has been very high, with news feed posts — that include vulgarity and appear to be written by 50 Cent himself — garners thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of Likes and hundreds of comments. The original goal was to award the United Nations World Food Programme one meal for every Page Like on Facebook to reach million; when the Page came short, 50 Cent donated the difference to feed a million children anyway.

The goal of Street King is to feed a billion children in five years, and the company just launched in September. A star-studded commercial with a parody of “The Hangover” starring Mike Tyson, 50 Cent and boxer Floyd Mayweather was also released as part of the campaign.

Whereas we’ve seen campaigns use Likes as a motivator for charity or product purchase, combining the two and then throwing in celebrity has managed to produce enviable Page growth and exposure for this new product.

Impact: In the past month the Page has grown from tens of thousands to 454,400 Likes, according to PageData. The promotion also has fans talking, primarily because of the fun, celebrity-studded video one might suppose, as the Page recently showed that more than 200,000 people were talking about the product.

Gray Line’s Spooktacular Mystery Contest

Goal: Engagement, Network Exposure

Method: Gray Line New York is a double-decker bus and motorcoach tourism company that launched a Halloween-themed contest on its Facebook Page to give away four tickets to its New York Night Tour.

Core Mechanic: The company posted the contest to its Facebook Page, but posted a link to its Tumblr account with the rules, then asked entrants to go back to the Facebook Page to post the trivia answers that count as an entry.

Impact: The contest was not streamlined and required no Liking of the Page so there appeared to be only a handful of entrants. Entry was pretty complicated: users have to read the rules on a blog, then go back to the post to comment their answers. Ultimately, it would have been more successful if it were Like-gated and if made easier by being held entirely on the Facebook platform. The Page is at 1,300 Likes